What's New Across the Mfg Value Platform This Week (July 26, 2026)
Tell us what systems you already run, and the value model stops charging you for them.
Last week we promised two things were coming. Letting your survey answers configure the model before you type a number into it, and continuing to refine how the model prices an improvement so its claims stay proportionate. Both shipped this week.
A survey that tells the value model what you already own
There is a new assessment under Targeted Diagnostics called Solutions Deployment Status. It is short, it is free, and it asks the one thing the value model most needed and never knew: which systems you actually run today. For each of the budget-line solutions, an MES, a CMMS, a QMS, a historian, and so on, you say whether it is in place, needs modernization, or is not present.
That answer flows straight into the cost side of your value analysis. Before this, the model quietly assumed you owned nothing and priced every solution from scratch, which tends to overstate what a project costs you. Now a plant that already runs a solid MES no longer sees a phantom multi-million-dollar MES line in front of every improvement that touches it. The model prices what you still need to buy, not what is already bolted to the floor.
We built it to match how a multi-plant company actually looks. You answer once at the company level to set the standard, and every plant inherits that standard as a starting point it can override. So if three of your seven sites are still on a legacy CMMS while corporate has moved to a hosted one, those three mark their exception and the rest inherit. The deployment assumptions page now shows each site what it is inheriting from its parent, names where the value came from, and stores only a site's differences. When you finish, you get a quick summary of what you have and what the gaps are worth, with a link straight into the value analysis.
The free assessment configuring the paid model is a thread we have wanted to pull for a while. This is the first turn of it.
Refining how the model prices a claim
We continue to refine the value model, and this week's pass was about proportion. Our math works by connecting an improvement to the specific finance lines it moves. We tightened those connections so a use case that addresses part of a cost line claims only its part, rather than reaching further into the line than it should. We calibrated that measure by measure, so genuinely direct effects, inspection hours against inspection labor, scrap against scrap, keep their full reach, while broader measures are scoped to the share they actually touch.
The result is a more precise number, and a more defensible one. That is the standard we hold ourselves to: figures that hold up when a CFO asks how you got there. As part of the same pass, the audit walk now measures how concentrated a claim is against a line's own size, so you can see at a glance where a single use case carries most of a number.
One change worth being plain about
The company workspace, the rolled-up dashboards, value maps, initiatives, and deliverables, is now a licensed tier. The tools themselves stay free: taking surveys, browsing use cases, running the calculator, modeling your company and its sites, none of that changes. If you have already been building real work in the company workspace, you have been carried over, so nothing you rely on went dark. We would rather tell you this directly than have you discover it at a wall.
Coming soon
The retake loop. Surveys already keep each completed assessment with its date and cycle, so the groundwork is in for the part people keep asking for: taking an assessment again next quarter and seeing, side by side, where you moved. Maturity up eight tenths of a point since Q2, this gap closed, that one still open. Measuring the change is where a maturity program earns its keep, and that comparison view is what we are building next.
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— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions